Walter Bagehot Quotes

Policy remedies tend to have unfortunate side effects.

Success sometimes can really bite you in the shorts.

Political reforms, without exception, have a down side.

Actions can have unintended adverse consequences.

It's hard to hear that your good intentions are making things worse and tragic.

Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets.

Nobody makes movies bad on purpose.

When I went to bed as a child, I was told, 'You don't know where you'll wake up.' When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect - milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

Nothing leads to good that is not natural.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

There have been loads of times I have regretted meeting Paul because I was so happy in my old life.

We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight, and of the fact that we don't want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction

A right decision at the wrong time is a wrong decision.

Change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

Quite often good things have harmful consequences… men have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage.

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes--circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

The cure can be worse than the illness

Every technology is used before it is completely understood. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our head.

We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places. [The Web] has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.

Watching well-meaning authors follow in the footsteps of someone going in the wrong direction breaks my heart.